Stem cell research saved Trump.  Guess we should have stopped it much sooner.

Irony and karma at its finest.

That’s certainly a hot take.  Have a great day!

I wish they’d just release a single player game on this engine in this universe. The gameplay and visuals are great, I just don’t need all the MMO stuff.

You believe in absolutely nothing. ;-*

Something about your simple reply here intrigued me: it was somehow very clear that you are an asshole of unusual stinkiness and ugliness!

Clearly, you are a winner also.

Oh fuck off and actually learn something. Ain’t gonna kill you.

You can certainly be smart without having a formal education - my grandfather was like that. Dropped out of high school to lie about his age and education to join the Marine Corps in WWII. Worked his was up from bread salesman to VP of Distribution for big baking company. But I would also say the military, especially…

That’s because it’s hard for people to see a big picture that spreads over the course of decades and generations, especially when there are no big obvious things like hundreds of years of slavery to pin things on.

HAH!  I love you too.

Yup it’s definitely a problem of classism, it also doesn’t help that lower education has been whittled away over the last 40 or so years and higher education has mostly become primarily a profit generating industry.

He’s not, other than perhaps by conflating “smart” and “educated”. There really was a tendency (not that long ago; I’m 50 and it was still there when I was growing up) for the working class to think education was a sucker’s game because they could make just as much if not more without it. It wasn’t until the 1980s…

He uses the term “learned helplessness” to describe people who have internalized the idea that nothing they do makes a difference in their lives. How else to explain the rampant domestic violence, ignoring of birth control, a diet of Mountain Dew and cigarettes, declining honest work in favor of being on the dole?

I feel like you’ve gotten the wrong impression from that statement: Those kids were told by their parents and grandparents that you never needed to read books or learn anything because only stupid people read books and learn thing. Anyone who is smart doesn’t do that, they become farmers or truck drivers.

It sounds like you grew up in similar circumstances. So, you know all about the sneering contempt for education and ambition.

People are too hard on that book. I think JD Vance is sympathetic to the plight of Appalachia/Rural America, with full acknowledgement that he was lucky to succeed.

Yeah, rural PA born and raised here and this:

There certainly is a strain of willful ignorance and excessive pride that can become a generational trait in certain demographics.

I grewup in rural northern lower Michigan and knew many people living these types of circumstances. Now, perhaps my ‘privilege’ was being born to MA degreed librarians descended from industrious German and Polish stock in the economic and cultural center for the approx. 100 mile square micro-region and that’s why I…